Small business owners must become literate about their company's books without becoming accountants in order to deal with CPAs, keep on top of operations, and prevent fraud, says the co-founder of an accounting services firm.

An entrepreneur preparing to secure funding from private investors called "angels" describes in this advice-packed article her systematic plan for approaching a milieu about which she knew very little. Tips include checking for resources online and crafting a presentation that gets across the company's unique offering while adhering to the formalities demanded by investors.

So far this year both the number and size of deals by venture capitalists are down over the final quarter of 2009.

A total of 681 deals for $4.7 billion were completed by VCs in the first quarter of 2010, according to a MoneyTree Report released by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers. That dollar amount is down about 10 percent over Q4 2009, but up nearly 40 percent over the same period last year.

Picnik's Jonathan Sposato helped orchestrate one of the Seattle tech community's highest profile M&amp;amp;A deals of the year when he sold the online photo editing service to Google. The feat was even more impressive given that it marked the second time that the 43-year-old Internet entrepreneur had sold a company to the search giant. And Sposato did it all without taking a dime of venture capital.

So, how did he pull it off? Sposato offered his thoughts on bootstrapping as well as his tips for selling companies in a talk at Seattle Lunch 2.0 last Friday. We were there, taking notes and shooting video. Here are some of the highlights, including Sposato telling the crowd that he and co-founders Mike Harrington and Darrin Massena didn't take venture capital money because they were "greedy."

The new national jobless numbers came out Friday morning with the umemployment rate falling from 9.9 percent to 9.7 percent - thank, in large part, to the 2010 Census that hired 411,000 temporary workers.

As what is known as one-to-one marketing takes hold, entrepreneurs must take the measure of customers as individuals and provide precisely what each customer craves--or risk extinction. The author advises consumer-oriented businesses to listen, probe, and touch, gathering information about each potential buyer, asking open-ended questions, and keeping in contact on a regular basis.

Some world-beaters start young. And they're thinking about more than lemonade stands.

In 1996 Apple celebrated its 20th anniversary, Mark Zuckerberg was in junior high and Jacob Cook--who owns a computer support company--was born.

No, your math is right: Cook is all of 13 years old.

Cook, who lives in Sacramento, Calif., has been an entrepreneur for three years. At age 10 he started buying books and other "low-end stuff" at garage sales and re-selling it on eBay. As he learned more about computers, he started creating video tutorials about fixing tech problems and broadcasting them on YouTube. After he was profiled in a local newspaper, people started contacting him with their own troubleshooting requests. Today he charges up to $30 an hour to help clients erase computer viruses and fix other problems.

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